The Word Exchange Read online

  “All right,” I agreed, groping in my pocket for my own Meme. Mentally filing details I could tell police. “I’m going.”

  “Yes. Good. You need help?” he asked.

  I shook my head and smiled. He smiled back. Our smiles said vastly different things.

  What he didn’t know was that mine was also a feint. He’d left his silver case exposed on the table, and while we spoke, I very slowly edged my hand closer to it. As I demurely agreed to leave, lowering my eyes, I slid my palm over it. In one quick twist, as he glanced again at the door, I slipped it into my pocket with my Meme.

  On my way to the exit, stepping over puddles and sheets of sullied paper, weaving quickly through the dirty concrete pillars, I looked back. He was still standing at the head of the table, watching me, one hand pressed to his head. Any moment he’d notice what I’d stolen. My pulse was thrumming so fast it made me sick. The floor seemed far away and pitched. Each screen I could see glowed with a smearing nimbus, and the smoke seemed to grow hotter and thicker. The room’s loud thunder softened, as if it were coming through cotton. Time dilated.

  But he wasn’t following me. I turned back to face the door; it seemed to have crept farther away. Stumbling, I hurried past the last pillar, the ziggurat of boxes, the men shifting them, who were watching me. When I finally reached the exit, I forced myself to look over my shoulder one last time. The foreman made a shooing motion, and prickles of relief stung my face. I nodded. He turned back toward the tubes, reaching into his pocket to retrieve his Meme. And I stepped out into the bright, cool hall.

  But I didn’t shut the door all the way. And I didn’t leave. I waited a few minutes, doing my best to get calm. I tore my coat and sweater off, fanned the hem of my shirt. Coughed. Leaned shakily against the wall. Closed my eyes against the painful light and pressed hard on my eyelids until I saw a luminous snow that lingered a moment after I opened them. I counted to twenty twenty times. Took a few ragged breaths. Glanced up and down the hall. All I saw were dingy white walls, blaring fluorescent bulbs, exposed ceilings busy with dusty tubes and pipes, gray concrete floor.

  For a moment I thought I heard an impossible noise, like running water. But it was hard to hear over the pounding drone of the Creatorium. I peered farther down the hall—not in the direction I’d come but the other way—and the floor did look wet; I saw a glittering reflection of the overheads. But I was more concerned that no one was coming and quickly turned back.

  I flapped my shirt a last time and tugged my dark sweater back on, leaving my green coat husked at my feet. Pulled the sweater’s hood up over my hair. And slipped quietly inside the Creatorium again. There was something else I needed to see before I’d let myself leave.

  The workers passing boxes in a line along the wall weren’t wearing lighted coils, but a few had safety glasses on, and most wore cotton masks to filter out the smoke. I watched a man slide a box from the towering mound near the door. Sine it in a flowing motion to the next man down, who tossed it gracefully to the man nearest him, and so on.

  As I hurried along the line, looking over my shoulder every few seconds at the foreman—he was back on the room’s other side, again turned toward the tubes, watching his Meme, but at any time he could look my way—I felt the temperature rise and the air grow even harder to breathe. By the time I reached the apse where a hunched worker was slicing boxes open, I was coughing without stopping. Sweat slid off my nose.

  Gazing through wavy lines of heat, eyes stinging, I made another awful discovery. As I watched in horror, barely swallowing a shout, books were wrested from boxes and tossed into the raging orange mouth of an old and badly ventilated coal furnace. I squinted at one of the boxes arcing by, and my heart ballooned. A white sticker affixed to the side read: N. AM. DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE: 3RD—R. The worker who’d just caught the box looked up at me, eyes widening over his white mask. Before he had time to miss a beat, I placed a finger to my mouth. Shook my head. Scurried back toward the door. Cast a last glance, before hurrying out, at the mountain of boxes. Each with a white sticker.

  Back in the hall, I pressed a hand to my chest. Wiped wet ash from my eyes. Leaned into the wall, coughed, and struggled to breathe. Putting on my coat, I tried to understand what I’d seen. I felt as if I’d just stepped out of a limn on twentieth-century book burnings: gaunt, vampiric Goebbels screaming beside a seditious inferno; Stalin; Mao and his Red Guards; Iranian forces in the Republic of Mahabad burning anything in Kurdish; midcentury New York school kids incinerating comics in Binghamton; Ray Bradbury’s firemen; apartheid-era librarians; Pinochet; Pol Pot; Serbian nationalists setting fire to the National and University Library.

  But this was no ordinary book-burning. Our digital corpus was also being dismantled, by pale, nimble hands. Who, I wondered, would want to destroy the Dictionary? Did Doug know? Was that why he’d vanished?

  I wanted to get out of there. Call the cops to report Doug gone. Describe what I’d just seen. But I was addled and not thinking clearly, and I started walking the wrong way—not toward the stairs but in the other direction, which I only really noticed when I heard splashing and looked down at my feet. And as I snapped back to consciousness, I saw that the large puddle I’d noticed a while earlier wasn’t a puddle; it was a very small stream. And it was being fed by a few black hoses peeking through holes drilled in the walls. But it also seemed to be coming straight up through the floor. A little channel had even been dug into the concrete to let it flow down the hall, where it veered left into an open door.3

  Cautiously I peeked inside. It was just a dark, dank storage closet, cool as a cave and plangent with rushing water. I hesitated for only a moment, to search for the light switch; I wanted to see where the water went. But before I could find it, I heard a man’s hard Russian voice call from down the hall, “You want to know what we hide there? Keep snooping and you’ll find out.”

  And that was it; I knew I’d been caught by the Slavic foreman. I felt oddly calm—the resolved, green tranquillity of waiting for a hurricane. Slowly I backed out of the closet, trying to invent some kind of story. But as soon as I turned around, I saw what my ears had already sensed but not yet quite transmitted to me: it wasn’t the same man. And when he saw me, he seemed surprised. But not as surprised as I was when he said, “Ms. Johnson.”

  I’d never seen him before. He wore the uniform of one of our guards. Introduced himself, in an accent thick as cream, as Dmitri Sokolov—the man, I deduced, whom the foreman didn’t like to disturb. He was massive: a dense three hundred pounds, six six or six five. The same physique and sad, soulful eyes of my favorite painting professor from college. I put him in his mid-forties, hair less pepper, more salt, but with eyebrows so dark they looked drawn in with charcoal. Clear blue eyes. Chin glinting with a scurf of day-old beard. His nose looked like it might have been broken once or twice. But he had a puckish, lopsided smile. And he teased, “I wasn’t expecting the pleasure of seeing you tonight. What are you doing here?”

  No story had materialized. “I got a little turned around,” I said. My mouth felt unreliable and dry, as if I’d been eating salt. But I was still keeping a diamond focus.

  “Yes,” he said. Winked. “And where did you think you were going?”

  Trying to think quickly, I blurted the wrong thing. “I was looking for Security,” I said. Or meant to say.

  He studied me with cold confusion. A dimple appeared in his forehead. And after a viscous pause, he said, “I do not know what this means, ‘obaysin.’ ”

  I had no idea what he was talking about. “Security?” I repeated, my voice crumbling out from under me.

  He frowned. Scratched his chin. The rasp of nails on stubble set me on edge. Staring down at me, he slowly cracked the knuckles of both hands. Then, enunciating, he said, “Closed.”

  My stomach shrank as if it had been trussed with string. All I wanted was to leave. Get to the street. Call the police. Find my father, alive.

  “Look, I really shou
ld be going,” I said, reaching into my pocket. Surprised for half a moment by the presence of the coil case, and hoping it didn’t show in my face, I gently removed my Meme. But there was no signal; strangely, it was asleep.

  He glanced down at my screen, and I could tell he saw what I saw: the half glow. No connection. “Really?” he said. He seemed amused. “You should be going?”

  “Yeah,” I said, trying to bridle my voice. “My boyfriend’s waiting.” I shook my Meme.

  “Boyfriend?” he mocked, eyebrows rising. “So you are meeting your boyfriend now?” He nodded lightly, the corners of his mouth dipping down. With a sickening tremor, I realized he didn’t believe me. As if he knew no one was waiting.

  Furtively I glanced up at the ceiling, and I realized, chest tightening, that there were no cameras in that hall. If Dmitri decided to take me back to the Creatorium, no one would know. It would be days before anyone even noticed I was gone. I could see the headline: “Father and Daughter Both Assumed Dead.”

  Dmitri said nothing for a long time. I tried to read his face, but it was illegible. Like a letter in a dream. I braced myself, every particle trembling with potential energy. I might not be able to fight him, but I wondered if I should try to run. If I made a mistake, I knew I’d be in much more trouble. I was in the rubber-band lag of a decision, imagining pushing past him and pounding down the hall. About to do it.

  But then the long, murky silence passed. He gently clapped his big hands, gave a sly half smile that brightened his blue eyes, and said, “All right, Ms. Johnson. Go see your boyfriend. Give my best wishes to him.”

  We hovered there another few seconds, him blocking the hall. Then he took one small half-step to the side, not enough for me to get by without our bodies touching. He smelled of cigarettes and fried onion, a trace of cinnamon. I shouldered past with tensile force and made myself walk with steady, resounding power. I felt his eyes on my back, almost felt him smiling. But I didn’t turn around.

  And I didn’t start running until I reached the stairs—then sprinted all the way up, heart feeling like a thing struggling to be born, holding my Meme like a torch. When I reached the lobby, I ran so fast across the marble floor I nearly fell. I realized only later that the woman who’d been at the front desk before wasn’t there anymore. No one was.

  Out on the street, I coughed and coughed on the wind, eyes tearing. Lungs sloughing off the inhaled atoms of my father’s life’s work. Signal restored, my Meme buzzed with two texts from old cell phones. One, sent by Bart, felt like a tiny life raft: “Any word? Hope you’re okay.” But the other was from Dr. Thwaite. “Alice,” it said, “do not use your Meme. And stay away from the Dictionary.” I tried calling, but he didn’t answer.

  My Meme hailed a cab, and once I was inside, it locked the door. It was a car with a live driver, and I saw him study me in the rearview mirror. We had trouble communicating; I had to give him my address three times before he finally nodded, unsmiling. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, but I didn’t feel well; I was sweaty, lightheaded. My Meme rolled the back window down. But I still got a little sick on the floor, and when I arrived outside my building, the Meme beamed my driver a 40 percent tip.

  I thought I was just depleted. After I made it up to my apartment, I was so exhausted that I climbed into bed in all my clothes.

  But tired as I was, I couldn’t sleep. My mind kept taking me on punitive loops around a gruesome track: terrible things that could have happened to Doug, that might have happened to me if the night had gone differently. I begged my brain to stop, told it I needed rest so that I could get myself together enough to call the cops and keep looking for Doug. I even tried conjuring good memories, which sometimes helped me drift off. But most were quickly hijacked by anxiety, and after a while I reached into my coat for my Meme.

  That’s when my fingers brushed the coil’s case again. And I wondered if it could stream something to take away my consciousness. Dr. Thwaite’s warning, to avoid Memes, floated up in my mind. With a small stab of bad faith, I told myself that he hadn’t said anything about this device. I doubted he’d approve of it either. But my stomach dipped as I thought of the heady serenity I’d experienced in the Creatorium when I’d taken the older woman’s coil. I felt an almost compulsive need to use the foreman’s.

  It didn’t seem to have an on switch; I just opened the case, removed it from its strange, clear solution, and placed it on my forehead. Once again I felt pinching, buzzing warmth. And I soon had a flurry of impressions that weren’t quite mine, far more distinct than before. A thin, topless woman rippling in one corner of my vision called up a twitch of lust and mild languor. It almost seemed I could smell her perfume—juniper and fruit. On a different visual plane, two boxers bludgeoning each other stirred me much more: I felt a strong pull of excited rage; optimism, as if I were about to win something; a vague throbbing in my jaw. In another corner I saw a pair of small children paw each other, vying to tell me a story in squeaky singsong, in a language I somehow nearly understood—maybe about a horse that had stepped on someone’s foot. (I sensed that I preferred the girl to the boy.)

  All of these memories—my memories, “our” memories—fluttered away very fast, like ash. But one thing vanished before I was ready: eerily lovely music so familiar I could almost name it—not quite. I wanted it back.

  And the strange thing was, after waiting what felt like only moments—it must have been far longer; maybe as much as half an hour, I was later told—there it was again. A flashing caption said it was Spiegel im Spiegel, a piece for piano and violin by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. Vera had fallen in love with it for a while when I was a child and played it over and over for months.

  That music unlocked the gate to a menagerie of sensations and memories, some that I’d been trying to summon to lull myself asleep, others that I’d forgotten, or that were half invented by the machine. But all incredibly rich in vivid, sweetly melancholic detail. Afterward I could recall only a few of them.

  In one Vera hummed along to Spiegel im Spiegel as she baked lemon bars;4 nearby I lay stretched on my stomach on a sun-warmed patch of floor, drawing a many-eyed dragon-wolf and occasionally glancing up at thrashing green trees outside the window, utterly absorbed, content, and sure of my place in the calm, perfect world.

  In another, even earlier one, from what must have been my fourth or fifth birthday, she and Doug took me on the train from the Upper West Side to the East Village for my first real art supplies. As they swung me between them on the sidewalk, Vera joked, “I think they sell colored pencils in our neighborhood,” and I felt a little guilty and happy and giddy with excitement.

  While this memory played, other images arrived on different planes: a subway map from that year, side by side with the most recent one, glowing with the changes (the Second Avenue line, the M, the extended G, the T and U). The weather report for that afternoon appeared (partly cloudy and 62°), morphing into current conditions (windy, 38°). I saw saturated color swatches alongside ads for glyph projectors that could re-create them faithfully. And some works I loved floated past—by Gerhard Richter, Vija Celmins, Ed Ruscha, Kiki Smith, Louise Bourgeois, Francis Bacon, Isamu Noguchi, Picasso, Caravaggio, Rubens—with the names and locations of their museums and collectors. There were even other memories, playing on smaller “screens” simultaneously: my first excruciating college crit, the tannic wine served at my thesis exhibition, tossing rolls of grasshopper cookies to Coco over our studio wall one night when we were both camped out before a group show. (I heard a muffled “Ouch,” and winced; then, a moment later, “Thank you, amour,” mumbled through a full mouth.)

  There was a freezing one, of Vera, Doug, and me flapping on the powdery ground of Riverside Park, making what Doug called “snow hippies,” not angels, because he claimed they always looked like they had bellbottoms on. (For the same reason I called them snow moms, after jeans Vera had once modeled.) In another few, Doug drew elaborate maps to the Natural History Museum and the Se
venty-ninth Street boat basin—three and seven blocks away, respectively—rubber-banded them to my wrist, and made me recite the routes back aloud. In yet another, my favorite, Vera had the flu and Doug and I tried to make her chicken soup. We took her a bowl in bed, and she tasted it bravely, but when Doug said, “It’s terrible?” she nodded, laughing, tears running down her cheeks, soup spilling on the sheets, and she set down the bowl and opened her arms and we both crawled into bed with her.

  There were lots of others, including many of Max and me. Our first kiss, beside a busy Hell’s Kitchen handball court to a noisy soundtrack of hooting kids. Max insisting that we find a place to go fishing the first time he went to my grandparents’ house in East Hampton and then making everyone, even my grandmother, eat our meager catch. Riding our bikes over the Brooklyn Bridge at night, handlebars jumping in my hands, and nearly being crushed by a car on the Brooklyn side, heart surging with the twin intoxicants of survival and love. Max singing Donny Hathaway’s “A Song for You” in the shower of our Dominica hotel room one morning when he thought I was still on the beach.

  All these memories—most of which skewed toward sentimentality—were elaborately layered, sprouting “added content” and ads. And the experience was strange in other ways. At one point, when Ramona appeared in a sequence from a middle-school field trip to the Bronx Zoo, I thought I even started to place a call to her—I heard a series of beeps followed by ringing—but the device said it was 2:37 a.m., and I made sure to “hang up,” which I did just by willing it (feeling very relieved that it hadn’t dialed Max).